Adding Absolutely Nothing to My Owl Movie

I made this Monster Owl in Animation class a few days ago. I really liked him and since I have no project I'm working on with him, I thought I might use it for Visual Effects class. What I didn't realize is that I kind of liked the way the owl monster was. He was simple, there was no background and I liked him that way.

That being said, I thought I'd make the movie a little weirder. A little less explanatory. So, first I used a shape layer to make all of the stars. I made the movement of one star and then copied it and pasted a bunch all over the scene. That way they would all sort of rotate in unison. They hardly rotate, though, which was what I was going for.

The next part was trickier. I wanted to play with masks a little, but I just couldn't get it to work in my scene. I wanted a moon to rise and to suck up the little owl. But, the way I composited all of the leaves etc didn't work with my mask idea. So, I decided to go with what I knew: the paintbrush. I wanted his twirling, flying motion to seem unreal, and so why he's flying all of this lush garden grows. With purple flowers. And then, when he glides back down to his branch they disappear and he blinks. I think the only problem with my construction here was that the video is too short for this to really make sense. It looks dumb. Third week of dumb looking projects. Bleh.





Here is the original, compare and notice how when I didn't add effects it's cooler.

third project

so i'm continuing to build the bathroom scene but already i'm bored with it and probably will build something new for next week. this time, i took out the sound and shortened everything (unfortunately the video goes on for about five seconds after my two second clip...oopsies). i added a toilet and a character. i'm unhappy how "slidey" everything looks. we talked about this in class in regards to "a scanner darkly" and i've encountered it before when using interpolation software (3d studio max, for example). i am going to work on fixing this sort of appearance in my future projects because i believe it gives my work an amateur feel that i want to move past.

i tried to make the woman in the bathtub look angry by throwing her arms up. i used two different segments for her arm parts and parented the lower part of the arm to the upper part. i used nested compositions AND easy ease out on the key frames for the arms.

right now i'm not super inspired by after effects. i like learning the program but it's nothing like flash, which i took to quickly and began to love. i think i might start working with animations i make in flash in after effects. all hypothetical projects of course.

so i was playing with vimeo's badge page. this isn't an update for this week's project. i'm frustrated because i uploaded older videos later on vimeo and so they show up most often. i didn't make that 3-D dog last year, I made it in highschool but it's my only 3-D work. bleh. but mostly i was trying to play around with some html from vimeo to here.

bathroom or something

so, due to some awful failures on the part of cs4 that are going to cause me to reinstall this weekend, this project isn't as tight as i would like it to be. the audio wasn't importing in after effects and so i threw the project into premiere, my only editing software. wouldn't you know it, premiere decided that it would not let me preview what i'm working on. so everytime i wanted to watch my movie in full, i would have to export. anyway, this is as tight as i could get my bathroom scene, which i will build upon each week. notice that there is no toilet. also, there is no one who is actually opening the door, i didn't do any character design for this piece.

besides for problems, let me explain to you the things i'm really happy about. i started this project with the intention of creating a dollhouse that animates. i was going to build one out of real fabric and wall paper samples, etc. but then i started watercoloring and got really into it. i love the way my bathtub and curtain turned out, they look stylistically like what i envisioned in my head. i was more concerned with the look than the animation, mostly because i knew i could build upon it each week. at this point i want to start building a huge dollhouse thing by the end of the semester, culminating with a gigantic set to use for future animations.

here is the video.

photoshop

as of recently, i've taken much pleasure in making tilt-shift photographs in photoshop. for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of tilt-shift photos, let me explain. originally, it was a process used while actually taking a photo to make your composition seem as if it was taken from a miniature set. i'll be honest and say i have no idea how to do it on my camera. but, since i am skilled in the ways of photoshop (meaning about five months ago i read a tutorial explaining how to make tilt-shift images) i've been able to create these interesting scenes in post-production.

so as i said, i've been doing this sort of photography lately. i've used a few of my own photographs and also those i find on the internet. for this project, i wanted to used something i found because the scenes i could think of were all impossible around austin. so i found an image of a highway. but i was bored with my usual experiments in tilt-shift. i thought i might add something magical, an element i've not seen before in such photographs. i decided to play with the idea that this scene really is a miniature and that someone is continuing to build the set. with the help of my roommate's hand and a toy house i had laying around my house, i was able to put together the image i wanted.

i'll talk the production process step by step.
1. found suitable photograph on the internet.
2. after duplicating the image (see ben, i listen), i created a mask on the new layer.
3. before i chose which parts to select and hide in the mask, i lens blurred the whole layer.
4. once the layer was blurred, i used the mask to select the part i wanted to be in focus, or the middle ground. in other words, i used the black brush to hide the middleground, allowing the original in-focus first layer to show through.
5. so, at this point i had my tilt-shift photograph finished. but that was too easy, and who doesn't want a challenge?
6. i then photographed my roommates hand holding a small cardboard house. after importing it into photoshop, i dragged it as a new layer onto my scene, sized it and created a mask so that i wouldn't have to erase.
7. after tweaking the mask for hours, i finally finished and noticed that the cars in the scene have very soft shadows. on another layer, i painted a small square and then made the layer opaque. i then blurred the edges of the shadow and trimmed it down to size.
8. my image is not perfect but i believe it was done to the best of my abilities. i think there seems to be some other message here, possibly relating to god and god's hands or something, but i didn't really start off with that message.



this post is very long.

until next time,
amelia

introductape

hello.

this is my new blog, although i have several others around the internet. i have my own photo and inspiration blog (ameliagiller.tumblr.com) and a street fashion blog (commonbirds.wordpress.com).

i cannot remember a time when i did not draw cartoons. as a nine year old, i wanted to be jim henson and became heavily involved in ventriloquism. i made my own puppets and for my birthday i received the creepiest dummy that i could find online. her name was dolly and my siblings tell me they still have nightmares about her.

this is jim henson, in case you were wondering.

as an eleven year old, i'd changed my hero from henson to disney, and wanted to draw princess movies for a living. thank god, that summer i attended a claymation camp for kids my age and soon dropped the princess fever, replacing it with a new found obsession for all things stop motion.

i won't bore you with the many stages of my artistic development. nowadays, i'm very interested in graphic design and animation. here is my final project for geoff marslett's intro class.


i write and draw comics for the daily texan. check out mipsterz and my most recent creation, craigslist!

more to come in the future!

amelia